Pine - An action adventure game that adapts to you

€121,480

pledged of €100,000 goal

4,091

backers

In Pine, Humans never reached the top of the food chain. Set on the living and breathing island of Albamare, an intricate ecology reacts, evolves and adapts to you specifically. It's up to Hue to find a new home for a near-extinct leftover tribe.

Inspired by the adventures of Link in the Zelda-series, the intriguing nemesis system of Shadow of Mordor, Fable's choice-dependent progression and the dance-like combat of Bloodborne, Pine brings you an ever-evolving world that provides each player with a fascinating and truly unique journey.

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In the world of Pine, every action, even inaction, has an effect. The way in which you explore the island of Albamare, come into contact and interact with its many inhabitants, defines how the world will change, evolve and adapt.

SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST, EVEN WHEN YOU’RE NOT INVOLVED

Pine is world-centric, meaning things will happen across the island even without your involvement. Based on principles borrowed from evolution and ecology theory, every single species will try what it can to survive - from small power shifts to the utter extinction of a group, Albamare's living, breathing and constantly evolving world can and will make it happen.

THE VAST ISLAND OF ALBAMARE IS WAITING TO BE EXPLORED, ONE MYSTERY AT A TIME

As you embark upon the quest to find a new home for your tribe, you uncover intriguing details about the history of the island and how the current evolutionary course came to pass.

USE A RANGE OF TOOLS TO MAKE YOUR WAY ACROSS THE ISLAND

The island will provide you with everything you need, and as you progress, you will discover a range of mysterious and helpful contraptions that will change the way you traverse, interact and fight. Scare away creatures with the Igniter, make your way across large gaps with the lofty Airglider or scale the highest cliffs using strong Climbing Axes!

ALBAMARE IS A DANGEROUS PLACE THAT LEARNS FROM YOUR EVERY MOVE

The island has its share of predators and territorial species. To defend yourself against attacks or influence the course of action, Pine features a solid and varied combat system that feels engaging with every encounter.

But be wary, as your enemies will adapt to how you fight: They will observe you, try out different tactics against you and evolve to specifically oppose your style. It will force you to adapt to them in turn, so choose your enemies wisely!

Based on their specific needs, some species will try to find shelter during storms or on cold nights, or even move to a new territory in large migrations. The weather can be your ally or your worst enemy, so keep an eye out for what's coming your way.

ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK FEATURING LIVE RECORDINGS

Inspired by both classical symphonies as well as contemporary game and film music, Pine's soundtrack by Ratchet Audio seamlessly flows through the experience as if it were coming from the island itself.

In the world of Pine, Humans never reached the top of the food chain. In this alternate ‘evolutionary timeline’, other species had the chance to develop language, culture and become smarter than ever.

You play as Hue, a smart but shy young adult growing up in an isolated tribe of Humans, deep in the beautiful pine woods of Albamare. Traditionally, the tribe never ventures into the Out, afraid of losing the small oasis of safety they made for themselves.

But when the Human territory suddenly becomes endangered, Hue is forced into the Out and thrust on a quest to find a way to make the Humans survive and thrive.

You discover more and more about island as you progress, uncovering mysteries about the Humans, the history of Albamare and the creatures that live on it.

While there is a clear goal to the game, we let you decide in what order you want to reach it. The story is linear, but the actors and sets will change based on what you do.

The island features numerous Vaults - mysterious places that hold important tools called Outfindings, which help you traverse the island and interact with its species in new and different ways. However, the Vaults don't give up on their treasures easily and put Hue to the test in spatial and social obstacles. But their rewards are worth the effort, as they grant new abilities and teach Hue about civilizations that once were!

We are filling Albamare's ecology with a wide variety of locations. It features mountains, plains, forests, beaches and swamps, ready to be explored in an open world-fashion.

The weather on the island is always active. A storm on the other side of Albamare might force species onto your path, and you might even need to take advantage of certain weather conditions to get things done.

We make it possible for you to ‘live off the land’, as all tools, resources and techniques come from the island and species. Some species are quite advanced, so you learn from them by taking or finding their weapons, equipment and resources.

Pine is all about your adventure, shaped by the way it evolves through your actions and interactions with its world. On your journey you will meet a wondrous cast of creatures, some more, some less evolved.

With every encounter, every interaction, you will learn more about the species you share the island with. Your decisions will alter the course of what all of Albamare will become.

The ecological hierarchy can be visualized as follows:

You can choose to befriend a species, fight alongside them, help them to gain territory or even bring them food and resources. But you may also choose to attack them, steal their food or force them to abandon their current habitat and move on. All of this will make the species dynamically move across the ecological spectrum.

Your actions will shift the power of balance between Albamare's inhabitants - choose your friends and enemies wisely!

Find pieces of equipment on the island, or trade with and steal from the species living on Albamare! Earn their trust by using armor sets that resemble their cultures.

Each organism within a species looks different. Using genetic algorithms, we give each organism a personality and specialty. Natural selection and survival of the fittest will do the rest: the entire species will grow more towards the organisms that are strongest against you.

So far, we have developed four fully-fledged species - our goal is to develop four more, with regional variants, to roam the island of Albamare.

An example of an evolved species, the Fexel. Throws bombs and uses lots of small tools and chemicals to survive on Albamare.

Alongside the species, at the bottom of the ecological triangle, are the critters. They’re unable to evolve, but serve as food or balance out the ecology in different ways. We plan to develop roughly a dozen of these, for a total of roughly 20 unique creatures, each bringing their own style and culture to Albamare.

One of Albamare's signature critters, the Alpafant.

Having worked on Pine for over a year, we’ve come to realize its potential. With systems that actually listen to what you do as a player, we feel like the game is taking a logical step forward in open world and action adventure game design. The game offers a personalized, individual experience to whoever holds the controller.

While the ambitions have always been high, a smart development cycle has allowed us to create a vast amount of content in a very small amount of time, while constantly testing and iterating on the strengths and weaknesses of our systems.

This campaign, if successful, will cover a bigpart of the game's full budget. We will use it to Kickstart Pine, and find the best possible partner to finish up the game. We're currently talking with a plethora of publishers who showed their interest in the project, so we are confident we can find a great partner among them.

Pine is being developed in Unity 5, which makes it possible to publish the game for Windows, Mac and Linux through digital distribution platforms. Consoles (PS4, Xbox One and Switch) are definitely on our radar.

We have always been very open about our development process of the game and we plan on keeping it that way. We have written articles, theses and presentations and have engaged with over 2500 testers for our early demos to see what works and doesn't work.

For a big part, the budget will cover the costs of development (and living) for the core team of six, plus a one-day-a-week freelancer for art support, plus a small but fair fee for our amazing audio partners. Luckily, we have only small costs for upholding the office and servers, but they still need to be covered. And, of course, we use some of the money for exciting backer rewards we cannot wait to hand out to all of you.

The core Pine-team

From left to right: Marc (@MarcPeyre) and Martin (@MeTheFlea) take care of programming and technology, while Matthijs (@Matthijz) takes care of design and production. Pascal (@PascalVis) is our character artist, whose creatures roam Timo's (@TimoMDvH) environments. Lukas (@LuKas_Stlp) then makes those creatures come to life with his animation work.

Being a small and relatively young team, our needs are quite simple: we are fully dedicated to making Pine cheaply and efficiently - preferably without making large losses. Kickstarter is a perfect fit for our project and company.

Pine and the island of Albamare have given us a lot of material to draw from. We ourselves have lucky enough to indulge in its world, and hopefully these rewards will bring you closer to the game too.

Risks and challenges

MANAGING EXPECTATIONS: As with a lot of game projects, it remains tough to give players an exact idea of what your game can do. We've had some players who imagined the wildest evolution (such as fish growing limbs), or expected some god-game mechanics. However, never would we want Pine to come across as a fully dynamic sandbox game in which creatures can evolve in any direction. We aim for a very solid experience and for this, we thoroughly believe in handcrafted scenarios and designs, combined with a layer of personalization through code. We hope this presentation can give you an idea of what to expect. We're always open for questions - there's no secrets from our side!

PEOPLE OF THE PROJECT: A game like Pine, a 3D third person action adventure game, requires a lot of work. Its many facets are all covered by our team and some externals at this point, but our human resources remain a risk to stay honest about. We don't pay ourselves much, but we all have to be able to keep working during the project. It would be quite hard to replace a member of the core team while keeping our vision of Pine intact. Reaching stretch goals can vastly mitigate part of this risk, but it's good to stay aware of the importance of everyone in our core team to the game's realization.

EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN: The first half year of pre-production was all about writing theoretical theses on Pine - how its systems adapt and what technical and design-based problems it would bring. We've come to a lot of conclusions through testing and iteration, but the fact remains that Pine's experimental layer of adaptation is a challenging task. We're extremely excited to flesh it out even more, but we're also very much aware of the constant challenge the adaptive systems might bring for a larger game.

DELAYS: We work extremely hard and on tight schedules to make sure we deliver what we promise. However, if some choices we have to make are between quality and time, we always strive for quality. Delays are not wanted, but sometimes it's better for the product to accept them - this goes for both demos and the final product.